September 15, 2014

OBS Sydney is looking for a front-end developer to join our great team, based near Wynyard Station right in the CBD.

If you have demonstrable experience and expertise across HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, jQuery etc, and are already using the latest frameworks such as angular.js and Ember and you’re interested in helping us create and implement some world class intranet website designs, and playing a critical role in the future of Australia’s most well-known businesses, then this might be the job for you (and I can't speak highly enough of OBS as a company).

Further info below!

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Front-end web developer

We are looking for a passionate and proactive Front End Web Developer to work closely with our Delivery team in enhancing our SharePoint Portal solutions for major Australian companies. In this role you will work with leading Microsoft technologies and a highly experienced team to build progressive solutions and help customers align and adopt them within their business.

This opportunity will suit someone who is looking to move their career into the Consulting world! This role will give you personal growth, challenging projects and a place where they can make a difference while having fun along the way!

Your responsibilities will include:

Enhancing the user interface of our solutions for our customers

Being the Front End Developer champion on our projects C

ontributing to the success of OBS!

You will come to us with:

Previous experience in a web development role Demonstrated skills in HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery and Photoshop Experience with client side MV* frameworks such as AngularJS, Knockout or Ember

September 10, 2014

It's been two years in the making, but in amongst all the other news today was the launch of a truly noteworthy new product from the brilliant team at Dynamic Owl SharePoint consultancy in Vancouver.

It's the Bonzai Intranet - an incredible looking and behaving, pre-built SharePoint intranet that organisations can deploy quickly and relatively inexpensively, providing employees with a modern user experience, mobile access and a great deal more.

Features include all the usual SharePoint capabilities, together with a ready-to-go news centre, employee directory, image gallery, market place. These capabilities can be blended with custom apps designed and developed for your organisation.

November 11, 2013

Despite the rapid uptake of enterprise social software, few organisations are fully utilising, or even fully aware of, the scope of the social capabilities they either have in place or are considering investment in.

This post builds on an existing model and outlines six key capabilities of enterprise social software tools.

Social networking

Group collaboration

Document collaboration

Structured ideation and problem solving

Mobile access

System integration

To some degree, most organisations looking at enterprise social are heavily focused on social networking (1) and group collaboration (2). These are the most common aspects, and also the most familiar and easy to grasp and implement. However, in most cases, capabilities 3-6 offer the most impact for organisations. Each capability is explained in more detail below.

1. Social networkingForming the front-end to nearly all enterprise social software is the familiar social networking interface. This comprises of common elements and interactions including likes, follows, comments, mentions and hash tags (using the ‘@’ and ‘#’ syntax), status updates asking ‘What are you working on?’, recommended users, profile pages, an instant message box (often with presence awareness) and the ability to attach images and files.

Many ESN products are also now building in more enterprise-oriented interactions including ‘praise a colleague’, while adapted language, for example changing ‘friends’ to ‘colleagues’, is the norm.

Social networking is really the essence of enterprise social. The prompts, call-outs and interactions primarily demonstrate our behaviours in an online space, and provide the ‘life’ of the environment.

2. Group collaborationOnline collaboration typically already happens across multiple channels – email, team sites, even shared drives can qualify. Yet these environments and tools are typically independent of one another, one-dimensional and they were designed eons ago with completely different objectives in mind. Enterprise social software provides a rich layer of interactivity that combines these one-dimensional tools and brings them into a contemporary, unified interface.

Existing team, project and common interest spaces can be replaced or complemented by the more interactive equivalent provided by enterprise social software products. Often this can be done with little to no loss of data or inherent structure. For example, Newsgator Social Sites Communities can augment basic SharePoint team sites, combining the features of both products.

3. Document collaborationDocument collaboration – on text files, spreadsheets and even presentations – is a capability driven mainly by the advances in cloud applications such as Microsoft’s web apps. While central document storage and version control has long been possible, web app versions of Word, for example, enable simultaneous, real-time collaboration in the form of co-authoring, commenting and more. Actions and tasks are associated with a colleague’s profile, and their actions can be surfaced in the document and, if suitable, parts of the broader environment.

Document collaboration is a substantial advancement in productivity tools, and on first use it can often be an inspiring one, because it’s so much better than the traditional modes of working, sharing and collaborating on files. As a social and collaborative capability, this is one of the more powerful demonstrations of the potential of enterprise social tools.

4. Crowd-based ideation and problem solving

Compared to similar capabilities, sites and services on the web, in the enterprise environment, social tools have very different dynamics. There’s often not the critical mass of people to generate the level of content and participation that might be ideally expected (especially early on in an initiative). There can also be a lot less clarity of purpose for the network to justify getting involved, and a lot more caution from employees who would, on the web, be happy to participate.

Structured ideation and problem solving is a wonderful capability of enterprise social software. It provides a framework that both utilises the inherent potential of enterprise social tools – global reach and potential participation of a whole organisation, speed of interactions, modern interfaces – and a structure that gives employees clarity and purpose for getting involved.

Asking colleagues and teams to “Help us solve this problem” or, ‘Get involved in this strategic topic” have been proven to be strong and purposeful prompts that have led to brilliant stories around team and organisation-wide collaboration, with focused outcomes.

As with file collaboration, successful ideation and problem-solving examples provide powerful demonstrations of the potential of enterprise social.

5. Mobile access

Web-based social networks are always available on mobile devices, in many cases even being designed as ‘mobile first’ (Path, Foursquare, Instagram). Yet in the enterprise space, social network availability can be hindered on mobile devices, or not available at all.

This is not usually the fault of the chosen product, as most have mobile applications that are under constant improvement and range from merely capable to superb (Yammer is an excellent example of constant mobile iterations). The issue can often lie more with strict IT or organisational policies and strategies that lag behind evolving working practices and the increasing technical sophistication of employees, and that mandate disconnecting mobile devices from any system beyond email.

Put simply, enterprise social tools and networks must be available on mobile devices. This enables anytime connectivity to the whole organization in a ways that just haven’t previously been possible. It also enables engagement with the organisation at times a traditional intranet cannot; at the bus stop, waiting for a meeting to start, in the lunch queue – ‘interstitial’ time – which we now want to occupy, often with social network interaction.

6. Integration

A key theme in many enterprise social initiatives is the augmentation of existing spaces with social capabilities. It’s obvious to think about social in a content-based scenario such as internal communication streams and channels, project collaboration and so on. Yet, adding the social layer to more transactional environments – CRM, HR and workflow for example – presents significant opportunity.

Companies like Newsgator and Yammer are pushing heavily towards this level of integration, providing customers with APIs and plugins for business platforms and enabling the goal of ‘social everywhere’. If an organisation is truly invested in the concepts of enterprise social as a business step change, then embedding it at a near-atomic level of its systems currently represents the leading edge of technical ambition.

Social in the context of your business

Wrapped up in these six capabilities are many smaller features and functions of enterprise social software. There’s certainly some overlap between them and overall an increasing sense commoditisation of enterprise social tools which offer the same features. Yet for any given organisation there will typically be a unique set of systems, organisational challenges and objectives, and marketplace dynamics, which will determine both what product(s) to go for, and what capabilities to utilise.

October 09, 2013

2014 will be the eighth year for The Digital Workplace Trends survey (formerly 'intranet trends survey') and, as is author Jane McConnell's habit, it's going from strength to strength.

If you're new to the Digital Workplace Trends survey, it's a global research project that consistently features responses from over 170 organisations on the topic of the digital workplace. You can read a great overiew, and this year key areas of focus include:

What makes up the digital workplace

Impact on the physical workplace

Social collaboration

Enterprise social networking

Video and e-learning

Information discovery

Mobile

Business impact of the digital workplace on the organization

Leadership involvement

Strategy, governance and decision-making

Change and challenges

Preparation for the future workplace

New and notable for this year is the inclusion of a Digital Workplace Scorecard, which is a customised output based on responses to the survey and your own organisation's context. I think this will be a further valuable takeaway for survey participants on top of getting the $530 report for free if you participate.

September 24, 2013

CUPERTINO, California―September 23, 2013―Apple® today announced it has sold a record-breaking nine million new iPhone® 5s and iPhone 5c models, just three days after the launch of the new iPhones on September 20. In addition, more than 200 million iOS devices are now running the completely redesigned iOS 7, making it the fastest software upgrade in history.

Let's say that's an average of $700 per phone. That's $6.3 BILLION in revenue. In a weekend. Not to mention all the cases, iTunes purchases and other stuff buyers may have picked up along the way.

It's a simply astonishing figure that doesn't even tell the full story. In Sydney today the iPhone 5S was sold out if you wanted to buy it outright off contract.

September 13, 2013

If you’re still thinking of a keynote
presentation some two weeks after it was given, it must have been a good one.

Designer and author Dan Saffer opened this year’s UX
Australia in Melbourne with an excellent talk around ‘microinteractions’ and it has really stuck with me. He's also written a book on the topic (‘Microinteractions’ - O’Reilly Media) and defines the concept thus:

Microinteractions are all around
us, from the turning on of an appliance to logging in to an online service to
getting the weather in a mobile app. They are the single use-case features that
do one thing only. They can be stand-alone apps or parts of larger features.
The best of them perform with efficiency, humour, style, and an understanding
of user needs and goals. The difference between a product we love and a product
we just tolerate are often the microinteractions we have with it.

Just a few minutes in to his presentation, Dan had formalised what I've generally thought of as UI and UX ‘polish’ and
finesse, but he demonstrated that it's more fundamental than that. Most designers will appreciate that details count, but when talking about 'microinteractions' I found myself thinking that it can completely define two comparitive products.

(Right: Rebecca Jackson's sketchnote of Dan Saffer's session. See below for further links to slides and audio)

In a contemporary context, nowhere is the difference in attention
to detail and microinteractions more obvious than when comparing Google’s
Android OS to Apple’s iOS. This is a comparison briefly referenced in the book
too (comparing the original HTC Google G1, with the original iPhone), but with recent
experience switching from iPhone to Android on a Samsung Galaxy S4, many other
examples jumped to mind.

It's the microinteractions that I'm unconsciously considering when thinking about how to answer ‘How do you like Android and the S4?’ I like it, but in some ways I'm tolerating it because of the way better hardware (bigger screen, battery etc), and because I wanted a change from my old, cracked iPhone 4S.

I do miss the quality of iOS though - nearly every single like-for-like App is better on it, no joke - and I would jump back to it in a heartbeat if Apple could bring themselves to produce a decent-sized phone with iOS7 (it won't be this year...). Apple is in no way perfect (as the book also highlights right at the off), but they do a good job - better than everyone else in this space.

Apple v Android is a huge and polarising debate though. There are many other examples that spring out every day when you're thinking on this theme. The slow response the NSW Opal travel card has when it hits the contact point (it's way slower than the Oyster card in London), the way a coffee machine might spill or drip in the same way all the time, double stitching in key places on my favourite shirts... It's details.

As Jared Spool says in his review of Microinteractions, ‘this is interaction design at the atomic level’ and that's an aspirational objective while also being actionable as an approach to start fixing the small things and designing with more focus from the start. I think Andy Polaine capped off the topic for me when he said in his own UX Australia talk (another highlight), 'I guess when you think about it... everything is a microinteraction."

What are some of the specific examples of Microinteraction
differences in iOS and Android? Here are just a few. There are at least half a
dozen more I could easily put down without even really thinking, but I’d be
keen to hear your own.

Bluetooth
connectivity

Bluetooth connectivity on iPhone for me does fulfil the
‘just works’ mantra. Pair an iPhone with a Bluetooth device (e.g my car) and
the two systems work in unison, rarely dropping a beat and usually only then if
I myself have messed something up. I get in my car, the car picks up the
iPhone’s signal, connects seamlessly and away we go.

On the S4? Well, most of the time unless prompted,
absolutely nothing happens. My car can’t find the phone, the phone doesn’t see
the car. Even if I make the S4 ‘visible to all’ it takes several increasingly frustrated
presses on the phone screen and the
car controls to make things play nice. And then I’m greeted with a phone book
and call register that bears very little relation to what’s written in the
phones contact list.

Do this a few times a week, and the difference between the
two experiences is stark.

Physical design

The iPhone has a Lightning connector. Proprietary? Sure. But
uni-directional, and with ports and connectors that are perfectly designed with
one another? Check.

The Galaxy S4 on the other hand? Micro-USB and the
never-ending game of ‘which direction does the connector go again,” played
several times daily. I’m not sure whether the new USB 3.0 micro connector will
be better or worse than USB, but for sure it can’t hold a torch to Lightning
connector’s ease of use.

In-app behaviours v
OS behaviours

Kindle for Android. Hmmm. I often find myself reading in bed
for at least a few minutes after my partner has drifted off to sleep. On
Android, I have to dim both the phone screen in system preferences and the Kindle app itself. Pretty
annoying.

On iOS, the screen dims at a global level.

I’ve also said before many times to friends that when it
comes to app for app comparison between iOS and Android, nearly every app that’s
on both is inferior on Android. Instagram, Runkeeper, even comparing the
inbuilt mail apps – the list is long, it’s really the hardware for me that I
prefer at this stage.

September 02, 2013

Last week saw the 5th UX Australia conference take place, this time at the Hilton on the Park in Melbourne. Though this was my fourth UX Australia conference (it's that good!), this was the first time I've presented at one. The topic: Designing successful enterprise social networks.

Related images, sketchnotes and slides are below and the slides can also be found on Slideshare.

Thanks to Donna, Steve and the whole UX Australia team for running another great event and picking me for a slot. There were too many excellent sessions to list, I'd recommend checking out the UX Australia tag on Twitter.